"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: Hrvoje> You can't localize general concepts like "characters are Hrvoje> not 1 byte". Of course you can, by making an opaque character object type and manipulating instances only through messages. We may not like the amount of work involved or the efficiency loss. The fact that 66 of the 201 .c files in my current xemacs-21/src directory contain a reference to Emchar or Bufbyte suggests it'd be horrendous. :-( Hrvoje> If third-party contributors don't understand Hrvoje> Mule coding conventions, too bad for them. Besides, the Hrvoje> conventions are not all that complex, once you get to know Hrvoje> them -- which goes for the rest of the XEmacs C sources. <DIV ATTITUDE="tongue-in-cheek"> You are of course referring to the GCPRO convention? </DIV> I don't contest your points, pragmatically. But even now we still have problems with integer vs. character comparisons cropping up every once in a while. Also, eventually we are going to have to modernize Mule; the current implementation is just too constraining with the Japanese talking about creating a completely new character set standard which will have to coexist with the old one, only about 20% of the Chinese standards implemented as yet, and Unicode not implemented at all. (Morioka-san did send some patches for Unicode/UCS, which I haven't looked at closely. There was no discussion at the time, and they haven't been incorporated.) If some of the underlying Mule implementation could be off-loaded into a module with a specific set of calling conventions, it might help to formalize the mess a bit, and head off some of the inevitable confusion when that modernization happens. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."